World newsThe chemist, the bus drivers and 187 bodies
Murder squad survivor leads police to the maniac who hired killers from his Mexican prison cellIn the cold desert night, the stranger appeared like a ghost. Blood streamed from a cut above her puffy, blackened eye. Her baggy pants and blouse were dirt-streaked, and she was missing a shoe.
To the peasant who saw her staggering towards his house, she was a terrifying sight. 'You'd better get out of here, or I'll fill you with bullets,' he warned her.
'Please, sir, let me explain,' begged the approaching figure. To the man's astonishment, it was a 14-year-old girl.
The girl told a tale that has electrified this bustling border city in the past few months. It is being hailed as a rare break in one of Mexico's greatest crime mysteries: the killing of nearly 200 women here since 1993.
For years, experts and officials have struggled to explain the murders in this city across the border from El Paso. A serial killer? A macho backlash in an industrial hub that thrives on cheap female labour? Now the authorities had a survivor, apparently left for dead on the city's outskirts.
As a result of the girl's testimony, five men were charged last month in connection with the killings of seven women. One is also accused of raping the girl.
Prosecutors say they have uncovered a sinister tale of murder for hire, involving vulnerable female employees at American-owned factories. Bus drivers who were supposed to provide safety for the factory girls, they say, were the predators.
In perhaps the most ghoulish twist in the story, the drivers said they were working for a jailed chemist who told them they were to rape and murder two women a month and would be paid $1,200 on production of the evidence - the victims' underwear.
It all began six years ago. At first, it seemed nothing unusual. There were women shot by jealous boyfriends, knifed in gang fights, killed by drug overdoses. The homicide statistics were unremarkable for a mushrooming city of 1.5 million, as famed for its bars and thriving drug trade as for its sprawling industrial parks.
But another kind of corpse began turning up: young, slender women with long dark hair, many of them students or workers at maquiladoras, the mainly American-owned assembly plants that have flourished along the border.
Most had been raped and strangled. And they had another common trait. 'They had no panties. None. They could have all their other clothes - shoes, socks, stockings, bra. But no underpants,' said Suly Ponce, head of the local Special Prosecutor's Office for Women's Homicides.
Nearly one-third of the 187 women killed since 1993 fit that pattern, she added.
Despite consultations with everyone from the FBI to a US criminal-profiling expert, there have been few convictions, and women's groups say that officials are not trying hard enough.
'The authorities haven't cared because the victims are women and they're poor, and many times they have no family in Juarez,' said Alma Vucovich, president of the Mexican Congress's Committee on Sexual Equality, which has demanded federal intervention.
Now, however, even critics believe there may be progress. The key is the 14-year-old survivor.
She is typical of the army of labourers in the city's 330 maquiladora plants. The companies favour female employees, arguing that they are more nimble and orderly. Mexican women have embraced the factory jobs and freedom they couldn't find elsewhere in this traditional society.
The girl arrived from the northern city of Durango four years ago with her mother, Maria de la Luz Gonzalez. 'Here, there's work,' Gonzalez, 47, said in an interview in her wood-and-tarpaper shack in a desolate slum at the desert's edge.
Labouring in factories that pay little more than Mexico's $3-a-day minimum wage, Gonzalez struggled. When her daughter wanted to buy the baggy hip-hop pants so popular with teenagers, Gonzalez put her foot down. The girl would have to earn her own money.
That was easy. The girl passed herself off as a 17-year-old, using a friend's birth certificate. Soon she was assembling motors on the 4pm-to-1am shift at Motores Electricos, a subsidiary of the Milwaukee-based AO Smith Corporation.
But on 18 March, three weeks after the girl had started work, she didn't come home. Her mother tells the story: the driver of the company bus took the nervous girl, his last passenger, to the edge of the city and turned off the lights.
'I'm going to kill you,' he growled. The last thing the girl remembers is his grip on her neck.
She regained consciousness near the home of the peasant, who called for help. She declines to be interviewed, her mother said. As a rape victim, she is not being identified by most of the media. But she has appeared in court accusing the driver, Jesus Manuel Guardado.
Investigators say Guardado led them to three other factory bus drivers and their alleged ringleader, Victor Moreno. These are the men who were charged last month.
In a recent court appearance, they pleaded not guilty, but when they were arrested, they had told a chilling tale of murder.
According to prosecutors, the men said they had received a bizarre offer from a convicted killer in a Juarez jail, Omar Latif Sharif: he would pay them to rape and murder. Addicted to cocaine and desperate for money, the drivers agreed.
Sharif has long been a central suspect, but he was not convicted of anything until March, when he got 30 years for one murder. He has appealed.
'His accomplices say Sharif's idea was to distract attention from himself. With this, he would make the authorities and the citizenry think he had nothing to do with the other homicides, since he was in jail,' Ponce said.
She said that investigators are trying to find out where Sharif got the money to pay the bus drivers but believe it came from patents on his inventions.
As for the five men facing charges, they initially admitted the killings but recanted in court, saying they had confessed under torture.
Even if their confessions are true, they account for only 20 murders. Last year an ex-FBI criminal profiler said several other serial killers may be at large.
The women workers are still afraid but they go on taking the company buses. Nati Varona, 36, travelling recently on the route used by the 14-year-old survivor, summed up their predicament. 'We have to work,' she said with a shrug. 'We have to take the risks.'
Los Angeles Times
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